Yet the blackened sandstone and charcoal compressed within it represent a working site that was already ancient some four thousand years ago. What makes the Lecarrow site particularly interesting is that another fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing monument typically identified by its characteristic spread of fire-cracked stone, lies just twenty metres to the north, suggesting this corner of the landscape was not incidentally used but deliberately returned to.

The site was partially excavated over two seasons in 1992 and 1993, and before a trowel went in, a rim sherd of decorated prehistoric pottery was already visible, protruding from the exposed stone in the cut face of a field drain that had sliced through the mound. The excavation revealed a mound roughly 7.4 metres north to south and 5 metres east to west, standing about 0.39 metres high, with evidence for at least two phases of use. The earlier phase centred on an oval depression, roughly 1.6 metres at its longest, lined with wooden pegs and traces of possible wattling, and interpreted as a trough of the kind used to heat water by dropping fire-heated stones into it. A stone-covered surface around it appears to have served as a work platform. A few metres to the south sat a more puzzling structure: a small stone-built feature with upright sandstone slab sides, a stone-lined floor, and what appeared to have been a slab roof. Excavators tentatively read it as an oven, though the absence of heat-fracturing left the interpretation open. A thin peat layer formed during this early phase, and the main mound of burnt stone accumulated on top of it in a later phase of activity. Radiocarbon dating of a charcoal sample placed the site firmly in the Early Bronze Age, with a calibrated date range of approximately 2121 to 1892 BC.